It's quite a challenge to choose poems for display on the tube during the 150th anniversary year of London Underground. All our poems in the coming year will relate to London and its history, and many will be by London poets. We hope the poems will also reflect the city in its diversity, a refuge for exiles and immigrants and a beacon for visitors from all over the world.

Nii Parkes describes the longing of a Ghanaian youth for comradeship in a cold city indifferent to his plight: "With reluctance I accepted the faux / deafness and odd looks my Accra greetings / attracted, but I couldn't quell my deep / yearning for contact, warmth, recognition." Lorna Goodison writes about a Jamaican teacher forced to work as a charwoman in the West End: "She sings 'Jerusalem' to herself and / recites the Romantic poets as she mops hallways and / scours toilets."

Visitors, exiles, immigrants – these are among the voices we hope to offer the travelling public, along with the more familiar voices of native Londoners. I love to imagine Karl Marx, thrown out of every country in Europe, making his way from his Soho lodgings to his usual seat in the British Museum reading room, using government Blue Books to document the inevitable collapse of capitalism. His later follower, Bertolt Brecht, in flight from Nazi Germany, described his London experience in The Caledonian Market and Buying Oranges: "In yellow fog along Southampton Street / Suddenly a fruit barrow, and an old hag / Beneath a lamp, fingering a paper bag. / I stood surprised and dumb like one who sees / What he's been after, right before his eyes. / Oranges! Always oranges, as of old!"

The city is large and various enough to contain multitudes, paradoxes, love and its opposite. It's exciting for us to find a Chinese dissident poet, Yang Lian, celebrating the Lee Valley, Hackney and Stoke Newington in Chinese, with English translations by half a dozen UK poets. ("Hackney is like a short Chinese verse" the poet writes – a thought that might surprise many Hackney residents.) It's moving to discover a novel-in-verse by the native Londoner Bernadine Evaristo, recreating the pilgrimages of her Nigerian father, Irish mother, and their ancestors. For poetry – especially English poetry – is global in its reach even when it celebrates the local and particular.

Cities across the world have started programmes similar to ours. Poems now appear on public transport in Paris, Barcelona and St Petersburg, Warsaw and Shanghai, São Paulo, New York and Toronto. London Underground has supported our own programme for more than 25 years. It's a simple idea that appeals to a wide swathe of the travelling public, an implicit contradiction of the assumption that poetry is an elitist art, the preserve of Milton's "fit audience, though few". The tube poems are popular because they offer an escape from the combined pressures of advertising and daily work. They invite the traveller to share the dreams and visions of another human being, speaking across time and place. The best poetry belongs quite naturally in a public space.